Elias Canetti Quotes

Alles, was man vergessen hat, schreit im Traum um Hilfe.

Say the most personal thing, say it, nothing else matters, don’t be ashamed, the generalities can be found in the newspaper.

You keep taking note of whatever confirms your ideas — better to write down what refutes and weakens them!

Relearn astonishment, stop grasping for knowledge, lose the habit of the past.

I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.

He panted for silence as others do for air.

Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.

The unconscious, which those who always speak of it least possess.

I've nothing, am nothing, shall be nothing, and yet I take nothing.

Um Livreiro pode ser um Rei, mas um Rei jamais será um Livreiro.

Yes, this was his home. Here no harm could come to him. He smiled at the mere idea that any harm could come to him here. He avoided looking at the divan on which he slept. Every human creature needed a home, not a home of the kind understood by crude knock-you-down patriots, not a religion either, a mere insipid foretaste of a heavenly home: no, a real home, in which space, work, friends, recreation, and the scope of a man's ideas came together into an orderly whole, into — so to speak — a personal cosmos. The best definition of a home was a library.

There is, in Kafka, a sort of sleep-worship; he regards sleep as a panacea.

Ionako ne postoji oskudica u osrednjim glavama.

She was crude, but loyal. He began to understand her even better than before. A pity she was so old; it was too late to try to make a human being of her.

A existência pacífica na maioria das sociedades humanas possui um curso enganoso, procurando encobrir perigos e fissuras. O desaparecimento constante de pessoas de seu meio - pessoas que aqui e ali, subitamente, não se encontram mais entre os vivos - é entendido e explicado de tal forma que é como se elas não tivessem sumido de todo. Dirigimo-nos a elas, em procedimento tranquilizadores de caráter singular, como se ainda pudessem ter parte na sociedade. Em muitos casos, acreditava-se realmente na permanência delas em algum lugar, e sua inveja dos vivos era temida, pois podia acarretar perigosas conseqüências para estes.